Values Turned Upside-Down

It's finally November, the time where, in previous years, primary season tended to heat up. This time four years ago, stories about Howard Dean, John Kerry, and John Edwards and the fight for the 2004 Democratic nomination were beginning to get coverage, and eight years ago, there was talk on the Republican side about who would challenge the relatively obvious choice for the Democratic nomination, Al Gore. This time around, however, we've been talking about '08 since November '06, basically a year ahead of time.

Obama and Hillary. Guliani and Romney. On the one hand, it seems like they've been getting all the airplay and all the media's attention. On the other hand, however, if one only listens to the talk around a college campus and browses some of the internet's most popular news sites, it becomes clear that we have a few other (apparently more important) things on our mind.

Like Hollywood.

In a relatively simple--but still revealing--graph made by Google Trends, I compared the volume of online news hits between Hillary Clinton and Britney Spears over the past twelve months. Like her life, Britney's graph has plenty of highs and lows (with her "high" following her MTV VMAs embarassment), but it's been consistently above the number of news hits for Hillary. Meanwhile, in another graph comparing the number of news hits for Republican front-runner Rudy Guliani to Harry Potter--who isn't even a real person--one gets the same results. I don't know about most people, but the fact that more people seem to care about a wizard's quiditch skills than a potential president's foreign policy is a bit disconcerting, to say the least.

Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert's unofficial primary election Facebook group--1,000,000 Strong for Stephen Colbert--has more than 1.3 million members. The group that inspired the Colbert group was Barack Obama's One Million Strong for Barack, with not even 400,000 members. Even a similar group protesting supposedly polarizing Hillary (One Million Strong AGAINST Hillary) just recently celebrated making it halfway to one million. The pro-Obama and the anti-Hillary group don't even come close to combining to surpass the total's for Colbert--a fake candidate running a fake campaign in a single state.

What does the fact that Britney, Potter, and Colbert have generated more excitement and online hits than our country's potential future leaders mean? I'm not quite sure, but it's definitely worth thinking about. Will more people vote in the next American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, or whatever show some TV station comes up with next than the '08 pimaries?

Priorities and values are key insights into what a society is about. And right now, our priorities and values are mixed up, and it's about time we took notice.